Thread: Opinions on the mini lathe - W385 from H+F MH

Good choice, and yeah, sign up and wait for the special. Here's something i turned this morning with my WL-14.

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I don't know if anyone has tried to change the belt speed on the H&F machine but on mine it was impossible. In the low speed position the motor wouldn't clear part of the body of the lathe. I bought the next size up poly V-groove belt but it was too long. I was going to send the thing back but Sean at Total Tools spoke with H&F and all the other machines on the floor had the same problem. But they did me a really good deal on a scroll chuck and adaptor for the machine and I don't need slow speed anyway. In the end I was happy but loading the machine into the car and then unloading it again 4 hours later was a real pain in the L4/L5 disc space.

No problem on mine.

Old Hilly I gave my mini lathe away (not because of a problem just upgraded) but I recall I experienced difficulty although they must have fixed it by the time I got mine because I got there in the end - it was just a real bugger to move. It was confusing because the lever should have de-tensioned enough to move so I kept thinking I'm doing something wrong but it ended up just needing a lot of grunt.

I also found it didn't matter in the end with the good EVS control. The lowest range on the high-speed pulley setting was always low enough and the highest speed on the low-speed was always high enough.

I'm confused by the earlier comment about it only being for pens and really small stuff. I agree it does not have heavy grunt for major stock removal in a hurry by the way the Vicmarc's I use at the shed I go to. However with sharp tools I found it was fine for larger stuff. When cuts were failing I was usually able to correct by either better workholding or re-sharpening.

I think something that deserves mention is it's a good lathe for beginners because of, and not in spite of, the low grunt. When I was fooling around teaching myself mostly from Youtube videos I had quite a few catches and a catch at 0.5hp is a very different beast to a catch at 2hp.

Originally Posted by Old Hilly

I don't know if anyone has tried to change the belt speed on the H&F machine but on mine it was impossible. In the low speed position the motor wouldn't clear part of the body of the lathe. I bought the next size up poly V-groove belt but it was too long. I was going to send the thing back but Sean at Total Tools spoke with H&F and all the other machines on the floor had the same problem. But they did me a really good deal on a scroll chuck and adaptor for the machine and I don't need slow speed anyway. In the end I was happy but loading the machine into the car and then unloading it again 4 hours later was a real pain in the L4/L5 disc space.

Well, thank you Cgcc, I am in a way glad that someone found a way around the speed change problem with that lathe. It was, or perhaps still is, a design fault with this machines. Only H&F will know how many they had returned under warranty and we will never know if they were fixed or just dumped.